Lifting the Veil
by fantacination
Summary: Epiphany. It strikes you hard. If you're lucky it'll also be hot and on top of you. Soma/Agni; Soma character introspective. Because it's easy really, if you try, to laugh louder and harder than anyone else.


**Lifting the Veil**

_fantacination_

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disclaimer: Kuroshitsuji and all its questionable characters and settings belong to Toboso Yana and Squeenix, fanwork is fanwork.

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Most nights, Soma dreams. Sometimes he sees his parents: his mother, pretty curls and painted lips, turning to wrap her arms around him; his father, stern and respected, resting his hand on his shoulder. Sometimes he sees monsters, black and red with scything claws, whispering in his ear and cutting off his legs. And sometimes, sometimes, he sees himself riding a train of white elephants, the filmy cloth of an ornate gold tent blowing back in a breeze and him laughing at the world and turning towards the warm touch on his hand.

Soma always wakes up before he can see anything else.

So he doesn't pay them any mind: dreams, and parents and other things that are never going to be his.

And today, when he wakes, it's summer, with the smells and sights and the festivals approaching. Summer days with hot summer sun, bright and burning, unforgiving to the phantoms of the night and the dusty dark of empty rooms. Another day in the summer of his sixteenth year, and there was curry to be sampled, spars to be won, and maids to play tricks on.

It's easy, if you really try, to laugh louder and harder than anyone else.

---

"Agni! Haul me up!" Soma demands, in between gusts of laughter.

He pushes his thick dark hair back, glancing up at the wide blue sky. The sun is still hot, but the cold water runs in rivulets down his neck and he is _cool_, for a few blissful minutes. The maids are still shrieking in the aftermath of his trick, their washing scattered all over the yard and chickens besides.

Agni, earnest worry etched on his face, rushes to his aid.

"Prince, hold on…" From the pond's edge, Agni reaches for Soma, his broad, calloused hands closing firmly around slim wrists.

"Gotcha." Soma smirks wickedly, jerking his arms back and allowing their momentum to tumble them both back into the pond.

"Prince--!!"

They land with a splash that raises a fresh wave of shrieks among the unlucky maids still at the embankment.

Soma's hand catches on a sharp rock in the sand, a tiny line across the back of his hand burns and stings. He ignores it. Instead, he laughs breathlessly, looking up through the hazy summer air, wet locks sticking to damp cheeks and arms stretched away from himself. "Did you-"

The sun gets in Soma's eyes and when he blinks it away, he stops breathing.

Agni's lashes are long and wet. The light cotton kurta he'd been wearing sticks to his broad shoulders, the dark, lithe muscles underneath showing easily through the cloth. Strong hands still enclose Soma's wrists, pinning him to the sandy, shallow bottom of the pond.

"Prince! Did I hurt you?" Agni leans in. The light blue of his frantic eyes seems both familiar and fairer than the sky high above their heads. Had he ever noticed before, how Agni's lips curved just so?

Soma's mouth opens but his thoughts trickle through his fingers like cupped water raised to waiting lips.

Agni moves, and Soma, ridiculously, wants to tell him to stay put. But the day is suddenly hotter than ever and his stomach turns, lighter than air.

Bending, Agni helps the prince up. The familiar feel of his strong arms, like so many other times, presses against Soma's back for a moment, before letting go. Agni smiles gently, radiating his quiet joy. "I'll prepare dry clothes immediately," he promises.

Soma nods mutely, his mind still reeling.

And in his mind's eye he can only see Agni's smile and his eyes and the way his hand is always on his back; the casual way Soma had always slung an arm around him or leaned his chin on Agni's broad shoulder.

"Prince, you're hurt!" Agni abruptly picks up his hand, and the warmth, the jolt that runs through Soma's body is thunder and lightning on a cloudless day.

"I… I'm going first!" Jumping up with all the grace of a wounded mallard, Soma wades through the pond, running as soon as his feet set down on dry land.

His heart is pounding and his mind is screaming, his feet running a familiar maze because…

He'd never thought about it before. Had been trying so hard not to. (_You can't you can't it's forbidden it's law._)

That something, far in the back of his mind when he sat with Agni, backs pressed exhaustedly together after a teaching spar, talking about nothing and everything. That something that had fluttered out of his reach, like the thin cloth of a tent flap on a white elephant, capricious in the wind.

But a face, once the veil lifts, can never be unseen.

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**Notes:**  
On a slightly related tangent, homosexuality or (I think more specifically) buggering or anal sex was illegal in India at the time (English influence, since they were under British Raj and it was illegal in England? It was western influence that stopped Japanese pederasty too I think.) ... until now it's generally frowned upon but tolerated as long as you keep producing babies (given India's population, might explain a bit?) from what I read... Of course, what I read/remember may not be completely accurate. ^^

Also, I'm going to catch up on the kuro anime, yes. I'm dying to see the episode that'll shed some light on the servant trio's pasts.

This was half-spawned from a conversation withtasukigirl when I mentioned to her that for a touchy feely person, Soma doesn't actually touch Agni a whole lot (barring the piggy back ride). Thus, she mentioned that SOMETHING might've happened. and it all went from there. I'm looking forward to how she'll write this concept, too. :D Also betaed by the lovely aforementioned.


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